of rhyme and rhythm, the graceful and earnest writer, one feels the beating of a human heart.  One feels that he is giving us personal impressions of life and its joys and sorrows; that his imagination is powerful because it is genuinely his own; that the flowers of his fancy spring spontaneously from the soil.  Nor can I regard it as aught but an added grace that the strings of his instrument should vibrate so readily to what is beautiful and unselfish and delicate in human feeling.

Jose de Heredia
de l’Academie Francaise.

A ROMANCE OF YOUTH

BOOK 1.

CHAPTER I

ON THE BALCONY

As far back as Amedee Violette can remember, he sees himself in an infant’s cap upon a fifth-floor balcony covered with convolvulus; the child was very small, and the balcony seemed very large to him.  Amedee had received for a birthday present a box of water-colors, with which he was sprawled out upon an old rug, earnestly intent upon his work of coloring the woodcuts in an odd volume of the ‘Magasin Pittoresque’, and wetting his brush from time to time in his mouth.  The neighbors in the next apartment had a right to one-half of the balcony.  Some one in there was playing upon the piano Marcailhou’s Indiana Waltz, which was all the rage at that time.  Any man, born about the year 1845, who does not feel the tears of homesickness rise to his eyes as he turns over the pages of an old number of the ‘Magasin Pittoresque’, or who hears some one play upon an old piano Marcailhou’s Indiana Waltz, is not endowed with much sensibility.

When the child was tired of putting the “flesh color” upon the faces of all the persons in the engravings, he got up and went to peep through the railings of the balustrade.  He saw extending before him, from right to left, with a graceful curve, the Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, one of the quietest streets in the Luxembourg quarter, then only half built up.  The branches of the trees spread over the wooden fences, which enclosed gardens so silent and tranquil that passers by could hear the birds singing in their cages.

It was a September afternoon, with a broad expanse of pure sky across which large clouds, like mountains of silver, moved in majestic slowness.

Suddenly a soft voice called him: 

“Amedee, your father will return from the office soon.  We must wash your hands before we sit down to the table, my darling.”

His mother came out upon the balcony for him.  His mother; his dear mother, whom he knew for so short a time!  It needs an effort for him to call her to mind now, his memories are so indistinct.  She was so modest and pretty, so pale, and with such charming blue eyes, always carrying her head on one side, as if the weight of her lovely chestnut hair was too heavy for her to bear, and smiling the sweet, tired smile of those who have not long to live!  She made his toilette, kissed him upon his forehead, after brushing his hair.  Then she laid their modest table, which was always decorated with a pretty vase of flowers.  Soon the father entered.  He was one of those mild, unpretentious men who let everybody run over them.